Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Another attack of the Dreaded Lurgi. Not sure if it's the last one come back for another go or a completely new improved with added whistles and bangs version but whichever it was I felt a lot more achey and snottier than the last time; it has seen me in bed for the past couple of days and I have done nothing. I have slept a lot, and read a lot - I seem to have absorbed eight books over forty-eight hours - OK, seven books and a collection of short stories by Alan Dean Foster. I feel better for it now but not fully recovered. I strongly suspect that sitting in a freezing Village Hall for a great chunk of Sunday reading prompt for the play that I'm techying next week had something to do with me getting ill. I also strongly suspect the kids are going down with it so I will, in all probability, be running up and downstairs feeding them hot juice and reading them the complete works of Dr. Seuss before the end of the week. Oh what fun.

I finally got to use the Lidl Mud bath gunge I was raving about the other day. The contents are brown as well. Brown and dense. I poured some into the bath as it was running and it just sat there at the bottom quivering until I poked it vigorously with one of the kids' bath toys and it broke up and scuttled around the bath looking for somewhere safer to hide. The back of the bottle which I hadn't really looked at before has the following instructions

Directions: Use daily as needed in a relaxing bath. For a full bath (200 Litres of water), fill the screw cap twice and pour into the bath water.Water temperature: 36-38 degrees.Duration of bath: 15-20 minutes.

Did I mention Lidl was German company?

This raises all sorts of questions in my mind. I have never been to Germany and know nothing about their plumbing or bathing habits (except they are supposed to have really weird toilets*). Do German baths have a scale up the side of them like a kitchen measuring jug? or maybe the taps have little flow meters on them that shut off after 200 litres. How else would you guess what 200l of water actually looks like? I can only suppose German baths also come fitted with a thermometer. How hot IS 36-38 degrees C? I have no idea. Mind you I have no idea what 36-38 degrees F is like either, except I think it's colder. What happens if I stay in the bath longer than 20 minutes? Do I become over-relaxed? (possibly dangerously French?). I need to know.

*please read this, if only to find out what 'Sitzpinkel' is and wonder why there isn't such a word in English.

About Me

I have all these bits of paper, backs of envelopes, sides of cardboard boxes, anything flat and blank enough to scribble on, full of half-drawn, stupid cartoons and idiot poems lying around.
For years I have been saying I must get round to doing something with them. For years I have been meaning to get to grips with learning how to drive our ancient vector graphics tools.
For years my wife has been wondering how it takes me so long to see the blindingly obvious.
I can't see the blindingly obvious most of the time because I'm usually drawing fish wearing platform shoes.